Observations: China and Face, Climate and Truth

Observations: China and Face, Climate and Truth

China Loses Face: We’ve all heard the old saw that booze is a truth serum meaning that if you really want to know what someone is thinking, get him drunk and he’ll tell you probably more than you want to know.

Top Chinese United Nations diplomat Sha Zukang got pie-eyed, tanked, snookered, drunk as a skunk while retreating with other U.N. big shots at their retreat at Alpbach, an Austrian ski resort, this week and spilled his guts.

Whether it was during some après-ski or pre-ski or non-ski festivities, Zukang let his hair down and brought to mind another old saw or maxim, to keep your friends close and your enemies closer.

Even as the Chinese continue to ramp up their military, (purely for self-defense, mind you, with nary a thought of war), and fill Walmart shelves with their cheap, semi-slave-labor-produced consumer goodies that Americans lap up, they smile at us in their enigmatic way that makes you wonder what they’re really smiling at.

Sha Zukang, U.N. Under-secretary General for Economic and Social Affairs, however, probably wasn’t smiling when he let loose a 15-minute tirade against his boss, Ban Ki-moon, and the United States. And this was during a toast, not a roast!

Sha wasn’t being very social or diplomatic when he said to the Secretary-General, “You’ve been trying to get rid of me. You can fire me anytime, you can fire me today,” turning later to an American present and adding, “I really don’t like him: he’s an American and I really don’t like Americans.”

Hmmm, vedy interesting.

It wasn’t the first time the loose-lipped Sha had spilled on Americans: “In a BBC interview in 2006 he was goaded into a furious, shrieking attack on American criticisms of China’s rapidly growing defence budget.”
(Read more at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=1892)